


inkstain

by schuylering



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: F/M, not quite a 5+1 fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 14:06:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6118711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schuylering/pseuds/schuylering
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times it almost happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	inkstain

1.

He's different that the other soldiers here, he's different than anyone here: Angelica knows that at the first. The way his eyes move around the room make it clear he's not just watching but devouring: he leans forward, shoulders too straight, and it makes him look birdlike, terribly delicate under the well-fit colonel's uniform. She's drawn to him the way she's drawn to a particularly handsome book in her father's library: she wants to study him, know everything there is to know about him.

He sees her walking toward him and looks up, eyes focusing on her like light through a glass. He watches her and only her as she steps nearer to him, eyes no longer darting half-wild around the room.

She pauses in front of him, and he takes her hand, pressing his lips to the second knuckle. She shivers, something cold and lovely running down her spine.

His eyes never leave hers; he straights up again, letting her fingers slip reluctantly through his. Angelica gathers her breath again, and says, "Angelica Schuyler."

"Alexander Hamilton," he replies, and thrusts his chest forward a few more inches. His says his name like she should already know it, and the arrogance is commonplace in soldiers but his comes with a tinge of something else, the hunger she'd seen in his eyes. She knows it, instinctively, because she knows it in herself.

The thought occurs to her, sudden and enticing, that she should simply take his hand again, lead him away from the right bustle of the ballroom and into some dark corner of her father's library where they'll be alone and undisturbed. What she wants from him is clear even as it's unsure, two equally interesting possibilities layered on top of each other. She wants to ask him about himself, figure out how he'd been pieced together out of his odd gracefulness and the stiff set of his shoulders, his easy smile and his hungry eyes. She wants to push him up against the shelves of soft leather bindings and polished wood, put her mouth over his and figure him out in an entirely different way.

She doesn't do either: she's always wanted too much and the wrong thing, and she's learned by now how to pull herself back, fit herself back into her skin, no more, no bigger. So instead she smiles, not too wide, but even then she can feel something sharpen in her gaze when she looks at him. A mirror to the way he looks at her. A match.

 

2.

They talk for what could be hours or minutes, it doesn't matter: Alexander knows before they say a word to each other that he has never met anyone like her before. And then the words start and he knows with a deep set certainty that he will never meet anyone like her again. She is a full stop in his history, a place he can never go back from. 

He's been the smartest person in every room he's walked into since he was twelve years old, and he's always held on to that knowledge, a talisman. He doesn't think he is anymore, and the thought isn't as frightening as he'd thought it would be. The air seems to sing between them, taut. 

He wants to reach out to her, touch her, explain to her with his hands and his words that she makes him feel more like himself. Like the self he wants to be, smart and able without the desperation he carries around in his stomach, the feeling he gets sometimes like he's flying out of his own skin. People say when they go crazy they lose their mind but Alexander doesn't think that's it at all: when he feels his least sane it's as if his mind has become too large, as if he has too much of it and he's gotten lost somewhere inside.

He doesn't feel like that now, though, and with her he has the irrational but no less deeply felt thought that he would never feel like that again. 

She smiles at him and it's like lightening, bright and fast and hard to look at before it's gone again. When she turns her head to glance at something across the room they're close enough that her hair brushes over his shoulder and the edge of his jaw, and he closes his eyes for just a moment at the feather touch. He wants, wants her like he's never wanted anyone before, unable to pick apart exactly what is it he wants except _her_ : her words and her hands and her body and her mind. 

She looks back at the same moment he opens his eyes, and for a moment they look at each other, caught. Then she says, "I'm about to change your life," and he nods, eager to follow wherever she'll lead him.

 

3.

Angelica announces the engagement with John sitting by her side, at the dinner table with her whole family in attendance. Her mother and father already knew, and she'd told her sisters in confidence, but her aunts and uncles gasp and coo, congratulating her. She smiles brightly, and only allows herself a single glance at Alexander's surprised look, the hurt barely concealed. She feels a flare of anger. As if he has the right.

"John Church?" Alexander asks when they finally get a moment alone in the parlor, after supper with her family still chatting and laughing in the next room over. His surprise and hurt have all melted away, and he has his eyebrows cocked at her as if they're sharing a joke.

She cocks her eyebrows right back. "Yes."

He laughs a little, disbelieving. "Angelica—he's a boar, he's, he's slow as a damned tortoise."

"A boar _and_ a tortoise," she murmurs, but he's not done yet.

"You can't marry him," Alexander says, leaning forward, putting his hand over hers like he doesn't realize it, doesn't realize what it means.

"Really," she says, dry as she can. She extracts her hand from under his, before setting it over his again in a mirror, what means to be a mockery of his patronization. Instead it feels too earnest, too close to real. She doesn't let it show. "And why not?"

He stares at her for a moment, surprised again and, worse than hurt, disappointed. Like she should already know that answer, and he's waiting for her to catch up. "You're too good for him," he says after a moment, as if it's the simplest thing in the world. "He doesn't deserve you."

She can't help it: she laughs. A sharp, bitter thing, and Alexander looks hurt again. _Who does?_ she wants to ask bitingly; _you?_ But all she does say is, "My family deserves his money." It's still too bluntly truthful, but Alexander knows her too well, would see through anything flighty or love-struck. He, at least, can understand bald pragmatism.

He looks at her, not the surprised disappointed look but one that's almost--she won't say it's sad, but resigned, disappointed on her behalf. His hand is still under hers, and their gazes catch in the dim parlor like a nail in a dress, snagging. Unraveling. "Angelica—" he says, voice both soft and rough, and his eyes change again, an edge of dark dangerous heat behind them.

And for a moment they're both unsure if they're going to do this, break Eliza's heart in this particular way. Break John's heart, she supposes, though she knows with the staid certainty with which she's always known herself that if he was the only one between them that wouldn't be enough to stop her. 

Alexander's fingers move under hers, just slightly, like he's trying to reach for something, reach for her.

For a moment she thinks about it, lets herself sink into the thought and stay there instead of speeding ahead, always one thought tripping over the heels of the next. She thinks about what his hands would feel like, not under hers but over her skin, the curve of her hip. She imagines what his mouth would do to hers, to her skin, to the soft sensitive place between her legs. She wants, and for a moment she lets herself, lets her eyes close against it.

She uses it, the moment of weakness, keeping her eyes closed until she's sure she can open them again and look him in those deep, lovely eyes and still, again, walk away.

"Good night, Alexander," she says, and stands up, leaving him alone in the dim room.

 

4.

Angelica leaves for London with a tearful goodbye for her family and a kiss, soft and quick, to Alexander's cheek. He finds her hand, take it and holds on probably a beat too long, but then she turns and gives him a look, one of their looks of perfect understanding. 

Now, he stares at the paper in front of him on his desk, smooth and blank, and thinks of her: her smooth skin and sharp smile and wonderful words. It's more than a want, what he feels when he thinks of her these days, but a need. Exactly who he needs to help this edge of dread that's always in his stomach, waiting to be fired, waiting for another of Washington's disappointed looks. Waiting for everything the crumble underneath him, the foothold he's only barely carved out falling away.

He imagines her here next to him and it's like he can feel her in the empty air, whole and real and so vibrantly alive. His whole body tenses in anticipating of her touch, a firm hand on his arm or her shoulder pressed to his. A witty remark whispered in his ear, for him and him only.

_Angelica—_ he writes and stops. The dash on the paper is bold and dark, his pen-strokes heavy with ink. _My dear_ , he tries, to soften it, _I wish you were now in New York and not so far as London, for I_

He stops again. _For I miss you_ , he tries, and adds _terribly_ , to the end of it, but it's still not enough. Before he thinks about it he's writing _I wish_ but he stops again. He knows what he wishes, but he couldn't put it down on paper, not with Eliza and the children only a few rooms away. He checks the door to his office: shut firmly, and locked. He swallows.

It's not as if—and there's the fire burning low in the hearth to destroy it—and it's not as if it means anything, he tells himself. He has always put his thoughts down in ink, and God knows he's thought about it already. This is but a small sin, the mere transference of thoughts to words that he does every day.

_I wish you were here with me_ , he writes. _I want_. He presses the heel of his palm between his eyes, the wire bridge of his glasses biting into his skin, pressing up against bone. He wants and wants, has always wanted to much and too widely, hungered past his fill. That, if anything, Angelica understands. In that, if anything, they are the same.

_I want to feel your hands on my skin_ , he writes, words coming fast and thick now that's he's given up fighting them. _I want to feel your mouth on mine, I want to kiss your lovely clever mouth and your full round breasts and your sweet wet cunt. I want to touch you until all I feel is you, until all I am is y—_

His quill tip breaks against the paper, smearing a jagged dark line over the words. Alexander's breathing is just as jagged in the quiet of his study, seeming to echo, like the walls are preserving some reminder of his misdeed. Not a misdeed, he reminds himself, only a—only a—

He crumples up the paper in his hand, ink still wet and tacky against his fingers. He pushes back his chair, the legs making a harsh sound on the floor, and throws the letter into the coals of the fire.

The paper takes an agonizingly long time to catch, coals hot but not flaming. It more disintegrates than burns away, and it's less satisfying that he thought it be. He feels less clean than he thought he would, after.

 

5.

"What if," he says, and stops. "What if it had been us?"

The fire's burning low in the hearth and the candles on the desk between them are too dim, but still they read through Alexander's endless writing, trying to assemble a speech from gratuitous pages of his first and second and third drafts. They had been looking for one particular sentence, that he said he remembered but couldn't recreate.

Angelica looks across the desk at him. He's watching her with a desperate look in his eye, verging on hopeless but not there yet. She knows what he's saying, and she won't play dumb by asking what he means. Still, it takes her a moment to answer.

"I wouldn't have been," she says finally, carefully. "It never would have been."

He laughs, short and harsh. "Why? Fate?"

"No," she says certainly. She knows why it wasn't them, was never going to be them, and it's because she had made a choice. Alexander or her sister. Herself or her sister. It was never fate, it was just her.

She looks back down at his strewn papers but he's still watching her, she can feel him. Instead of continuing this conversation she knows can lead them nowhere good, she picks up one of the sheets of paper, walks around to his side of the desk to place it next to the current draft he's abandoned mid-word. "There," she says, voice perfectly steady. "Your lost sentence."

Instead of looking at it, though, he reaches for her, his hand curving over her waist as he looks up at her instead. "Angelica," he says, and he looks like he's lost, like he wants her to lose herself with him.

She covers his hand with hers, a mirror of the last time this happened, the last time they let themselves get too close. The fact that there even was a last time is terrible, she knows: the fact that she can count the number of times they have come so close to something itself is some kind of betrayal of Eliza, who they agree (one of so many things they agree on) is the best person in either of their lives.

But they both can't quite become good enough to stop, it seems. When she was a child Angelica used to run her finger through candle flames, just to see if it would hurt, just to prove that she could do it without getting burned. This is something like that, she thinks. A game, but with a painful end.

Alexander drops his head, forehead skimming her skirts as he lets out a long breath, fingers tightening on her waist for just a moment. His hair falls forward, the back of his neck bared to her, sharp points of his spine seemingly about to break through his thin skin. She thinks she hears him say something, soft and whispering.

She curls her fingers around his, taking his hand from her waist. He looks up again at her, but lets his hand be taken.

She squeezes his fingers tight, before letting go. "Finish the speech," she says.

"Yes, ma'am," he replies, half-smiling, trying to make it into a joke. And like that, she knows they are on even ground again, back from the valleys of want they let themselves fall into (too often, she reminds herself, too much). Back to flirting without purpose, without the steady drive of want she can still feel inside her. Words can mean anything they want them to, she knows, they both know so well. That's the comfort of them.

 

"You have something on your dress," Eliza says the next day, nodding to the bodice of Angelica's dress. Angelica looks down to find black stains on the pale golden muslin: ink, pale and smeared but sunk into the cloth. She feels suddenly dirty, more than a small spot of ink should cause: Before now this thing between her and Alexander had been only words, only fleeting touches that ceased to exist as soon as they turned away from each other. This feels like proof, Alexander leaving a mark that won't wash out.

Angelica excuses herself, changes out of the dress and spends the next nights carefully tucking and sewing, fixing it until the ink is no longer visible, tucked away in the folds of cloth.

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me [on tumblr](http://schuylering.tumblr.com/)


End file.
